Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an optical signal acquiring and processing method without invasion to the organization structure of an imaging surface. In recent years, OCT has become a main retina disease diagnosis technique.
Regarding the retina disease diagnosis, doctors need to partition, recognize and diagnose the images of normal and diseased regions of the retina in real time. OCT can achieve a higher spatial resolution (several microns) than other imaging means such as ultrasonic imaging, X-ray imaging and magnetic resonance imaging, thus attracts extensive attentions recently.
The quantitative analyses of different layers of the retina can promote the diagnosis of the visual function change and help doctors to diagnose glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, diabetes I, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Thus, it is important to perform quantitative analyses of thicknesses of different layers of the retina while ensuring the speed and accuracy. Some people segment the retina through graph cut, and the error of analyzing 100 frames of retinas data of 10 normal persons is 0.94±0.82 microns, with an average speed of 9740 milliseconds per image.
But the existing segmentation methods are usually slow, and cannot meet the doctors' requirements of real-time capability and accuracy at the same time.